To those who are interested in improving the world, I recommend donating personal effort as well as (or instead of) money. From a selfish point of view, it provides a more diverse and potentially productive set of warm-fuzzy sources. And from an effectiveness angle it also allows you to make future donation decisions (whether they are in the form of effort or money) in a more informed fashion. For example, my experiences as a volunteer have taught me:
International programs which claim to implement self-sustaining improvements should be considered with skepticism, as cultural barriers can make this extremely difficult. Think NIH syndrome on crack; people can often be very reluctant to continue propogating ideas that they don’t feel they “own”. Any program which can actually accomplish self-sustaining improvements is very worthy of attention.
More generally, cultural differences can be enormously problematic to development programs, and often in ways that are difficult to predict in advance. A program that works in one country may very easily fail in another due to this, even if the program is seeking to address the same problem with the same techniques in both countries.
Making resources available is worse than useless if the people who would benefit from them don’t know the resources exist or how to get them, or cannot easily do so, or are left in the cold once the crates have been delivered. Watch out for grant programs with overly complex request procedures, and material distribution agencies with poor response times or inadequate support post-donation.
Personally, I now know of several agencies now that I will never give any money to, and a small number that I now can be fairly sure would spend my money well on the specific things I want to support.
To those who are interested in improving the world, I recommend donating personal effort as well as (or instead of) money. From a selfish point of view, it provides a more diverse and potentially productive set of warm-fuzzy sources. And from an effectiveness angle it also allows you to make future donation decisions (whether they are in the form of effort or money) in a more informed fashion. For example, my experiences as a volunteer have taught me:
International programs which claim to implement self-sustaining improvements should be considered with skepticism, as cultural barriers can make this extremely difficult. Think NIH syndrome on crack; people can often be very reluctant to continue propogating ideas that they don’t feel they “own”. Any program which can actually accomplish self-sustaining improvements is very worthy of attention.
More generally, cultural differences can be enormously problematic to development programs, and often in ways that are difficult to predict in advance. A program that works in one country may very easily fail in another due to this, even if the program is seeking to address the same problem with the same techniques in both countries.
Making resources available is worse than useless if the people who would benefit from them don’t know the resources exist or how to get them, or cannot easily do so, or are left in the cold once the crates have been delivered. Watch out for grant programs with overly complex request procedures, and material distribution agencies with poor response times or inadequate support post-donation.
Personally, I now know of several agencies now that I will never give any money to, and a small number that I now can be fairly sure would spend my money well on the specific things I want to support.